VNS Matrix-Pilled: Three Propositions for Revisiting 1990s Cyberfeminist Art Now

Abstract

Cultural studies scholar Jeremy Gilbert has argued for analysis of ‘the long 1990s’—a post-End of History period of technological advancement, cultural stagnation, and increasingly entrenched neoliberalism. According to Gilbert, the long 1990s are now—hopefully—over. This article argues that the Australian cyberfeminist artists VNS Matrix are, like the decade, overdue for comprehensive critical reassessment. As a starting point for this project, I set out three propositions for considering VNS Matrix’s artworks in light of current discourses at the intersection of art, technology, and feminism. Firstly, VNS Matrix wanted to abolish the family computer (meaning change the patriarchal structures of emotional attachment that shaped how women and queer people approached new technology). Secondly, VNS Matrix’s playful exploration of queer cyborgian sexuality pre-empted the ways in which sex, gender, and technology have become entwined in our ‘pharmacopornographic’ age, to quote Paul Preciado. Thirdly, decolonial critiques of art history mean that a technomaterialist approach is crucial for analysis of net art works; all that is digital begins in the physical. In the case of VNS Matrix, this framework means situating digital artworks in relation to the land that underpinned their genesis—Tartanya/Adelaide.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous peer-reviewers, Astrid Lorange, Verónica Tello, Victoria Perin, Giles Fielke, and Jeremy George, for their invaluable feedback on this paper.

Notes

1 The Matrix, directed by Lana and Lily Wachowski, Los Angeles: Village Roadshow Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Silver Pictures, 1999, https://www.stan.com.au/watch/the-matrix-1999.

2 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2017).

3 Gilbert is riffing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994); Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Captive Creativity: Breaking Free from the Long ’90s,’ paper presented at Capitalism, Culture, and Media conference, University of Leeds, 7–8 September 2015. The phrase the ‘end of history’ refers to political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s proposition that capitalist democracy had become the de facto hegemonic global political order after the fall of the Soviet Union. Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18.

4 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011); Jason Farago, ‘The 1990s Never Ended’, BBC, 5 February 2015, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150205-the-1990s-never-ended.

5 Annie McClanahan, ‘Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject’, Boundary 2 46, no. 1 (2019): 106–107.

6 Gilbert, ‘Captive Creativity’.

7 Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win It Back) (London: Verso, 2022), 9.

8 Ibid., 7.

9 Net art today is best defined by the Rhizome Net Art Anthology project: ‘Net Art Anthology aims to represent net art as an expansive, hybrid set of artistic practices that overlap with many media and disciplines. To accommodate this diversity of practice, Rhizome has defined “net art” as “art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it”. Rhizome prefers the term “net art” because it has been used more widely by artists than “internet art”, which is more commonly used by institutions, or “net.art”, which usually evokes a specific mid-90s movement. The informality of the term “net art” is also appropriate not only to the critical use of the web as an artistic medium, but also informal practices such as selfies and Twitter poems’. Rhizome and the New Museum, ‘Net Art Anthology’, June 2019, https://anthology.rhizome.org/.

10 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013).

11 For examples, see Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000); National Gallery of Australia, ‘Annual Lecture: Decolonise Your Feminism’, recording of streamed virtual presentation as part of Know My Name conference, Thursday 12 November, 2020, video, 1:29:23; and Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, ‘Decolonizing Art History’, Art History 43, no. 1 (2020): 8–66, doi:10.1111/1467-8365.12490.

12 VNS Matrix, ‘The Artists’, VNS Matrix Archive, https://vnsmatrix.net/the-artists (accessed 18 September 2022).

13 Melinda Rackham, ‘Manifesto’ (2018), VNS Matrix Archive, https://vnsmatrix.net/essays/manifesto#fn-cite-3 (accessed 28 January 2021).

14 Kay Schaffer, ‘The Game Girls of VNS Matrix: Challenging Gendered Identities in Cyberspace’, in Sexualities in History: A Reader, ed. Barry Reay and Kim M. Philips (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 439.

15 Claire L. Evans, ‘An Oral History of the First Cyberfeminists’, VICE, 12 December 2014, https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4mqa8/an-oral-history-of-the-first-cyberfeminists-vns-matrix.

16 Ibid.

17 Schaffer, ‘The Game Girls of VNS Matrix’, 434–452.

18 For a detailed history of women at the coalface of technological development, see Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (New York: Penguin, 2018).

19 VNS Matrix, A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, 1991, digital image, dimensions variable, https://vnsmatrix.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/cyberfeminist-manifesto-vns-matrix-english-sphere-final-bleed-artwork.jpg.

20 Schaffer, ‘The Game Girls of VNS Matrix’, 438.

21 Ibid., 439; VNS Matrix, ‘Bad Code’, VNS Matrix Archive, https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/bad-code (accessed 2 February 2021).

22 Cornelia Sollfrank, First Cyberfeminist International (Hamburg: OBN, 1998), 1, 89.

23 Barratt left in 1996. Da Rimini, Pierce, and Starrs officially disbanded in 1997. Melinda Rackham, ‘Game-Girl’ (2018), VNS Matrix, https://vnsmatrix.net/essays/game-girl (accessed 2 February 2021).

24 VNS Matrix, ‘Timeline’, VNS Matrix, https://vnsmatrix.net/#timeline (accessed 9 February 2021).

25 VNS Matrix, ‘The Artists’.

26 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Penguin, 2003), 49.

27 Mary Holmes, ‘What are the Politics of Gender?’, in What is Gender? Sociological Approaches (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), 110.

28 Jessie Daniels, ‘Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1/2 (2009): 102.

29 Mindy Seu, ‘About’, Cyberfeminism Index, first published online in 2020, compiled by Mindy Seu (continually updated), https://cyberfeminismindex.com/.

30 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 3.

31 Haraway lists ‘mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilised’. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 10–11.

32 Ibid., 15.

33 Ibid., 5.

34 Ibid., 52.

35 One of the major sticking points of this discourse in contemporary feminist debates is whether the invocation of binary, biological sexual difference is natural or essentialist or, as is argued by most participants, operating on a symbolic level.

36 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 28.

37 Ibid., 24.

38 Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

39 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle De Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 245.

40 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45.

41 See the Cyberfeminism Index, https://cyberfeminismindex.com/.

42 The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was a renegade organisation associated with Plant and the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land. See CCRU, Writings: 1997–2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017); Simon Reynolds, ‘Renegade Academic: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’, Energy Flash, 3 November 2009, https://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html.

43 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate Publishing, 1997).

44 Ibid., 178.

45 It is also worth wondering what Sadie Plant has come to think of cyberfeminism in intervening years—she subsequently retreated from public intellectual life.

46 Claire L. Evans, ‘Feminist Worldbuilding in the Australian Cyberswamp’, Rhizome, 27 October 2016, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/oct/27/cyberfeminist-worldbuilding/.

47 Along with the digital archive https://cyberfeminismindex.com/ there is also a book version of this project: Cyberfeminism Index, ed. Mindy Seu (Los Angeles: Inventory Press, 2023).

48 Post-Cyber Feminist International Conference program, Institute for Contemporary Art (London, 2017), https://archive.ica.art/sites/default/files/ICA%20PCFI%20PDF.pdf; Helen Hester, ‘After the Future: n Hypotheses of Post-Cyber Feminism’ (2017), Res, https://beingres.org/2017/06/30/afterthefuture-helenhester/ (accessed 15 December 2022).

49 Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (London: Verso Trade, 2018); Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018); Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2020).

50 Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto, 13.

51 Ibid., 23, 47, 53.

52 Russell, Glitch Feminism.

53 Hester, Xenofeminism, 151. Russell unfortunately misspells ‘VNS’ as ‘VNX’. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 26.

54 Anna Munster, ‘Low-Res Bleed: Congealed Affect and Digital Aesthetics’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 3, no. 1 (2002): 82–83, doi:10.1080/14434318.2002.11432706; Justin Clemens, ‘Virtually Anywhere Real-Time New-Old Avatar-Human Entertainment Art: Cao Fei Online’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 11, no. 1 (2011): 131, doi:10.1080/14434318.2011.11432620; Louise R. Mayhew, ‘Collaboration and Feminism: A Twenty-First Century Renascence’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 15, no. 2 (2015): 225, doi:10.1080/14434318.2015.1089821.

55 See Melissa Gronlund, Contemporary Art and Digital Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), 107–108; David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 426–427; and Alex Galloway, ‘A Report on Cyberfeminism: Sadie Plant relative to VNS Matrix’, Switch 9, 14 June 1998, http://switch.sjsu.edu/archive/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php%3Fartc=225.html.

56 Schaffer, ‘The Game Girls of VNS Matrix’, 434–452.

57 Ibid., 438.

58 VNS Matrix, ‘Projects’, VNS Matrix, https://vnsmatrix.net/projects (accessed 31 March 2023).

59 Evans, ‘An Oral History of the First Cyberfeminists’; Evans, ‘Feminist Worldbuilding in the Australian Cyberswamp’; Claire L. Evans, ‘“We Are The Future Cunt”: Cyberfeminism in the ’90s, VICE, 21 November 2014, https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x37gb/we-are-the-future-cunt-cyberfeminism-in-the-90s.

60 Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, in Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture, eds. Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 20–26.

61 Hester, Xenofeminism, 11.

62 Brenton J. Malin, Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 32.

63 Ibid., 32.

64 Schaffer, ‘The Game Girls of VNS Matrix’, 440; Burrows and O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 427.

65 Evans, ‘Feminist Worldbuilding in the Australian Cyberswamp’.

66 Evans, ‘An Oral History of the First Cyberfeminists’.

67 Evans, ‘Feminist Worldbuilding in the Australian Cyberswamp’.

68 Lisa Pears, ‘Forget Barbie, Let’s Slime’, Temper 1 (1992): 30.

69 J. Abbate, ‘Getting Small: A Short History of the Personal Computer’, Proceedings of the IEEE 87, no. 9 (1999): 1695–98, doi:10.1109/5.784256.

70 Adrian Johnston, ‘Jacques Lacan’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/lacan/; Emily Zakin, ‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/feminism-psychoanalysis/.

71 Lisa Pears, ‘Virginia Barratt’, Temper 1 (1992): 23.

72 Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), ix.

73 The term ‘sex wars’ refers to a constellation of 1980s debates, mainly in the US, on feminist perspectives on sex and sexuality. The key topics were porn, sex work, BDSM practices, and the nature of women’s agency. For recent scholarship problematising overly simplistic narratives of the sex wars, see Lorna Norman Bracewell, ‘Beyond Barnard: Liberalism, Antipornography Feminism, and the Sex Wars’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (2016): 23–48; and Amia Srinavasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 63–76.

74 Preciado, Testo Junkie.

75 Hester, Xenofeminism, 37–38.

76 Ibid., 22.

77 Preciado, Testo Junkie, 31.

78 Ibid., 14.

79 A full list of the work’s various iterations is compiled on the VNS Matrix archive. VNS Matrix, ‘ALL NEW GEN’, VNS Matrix Archive, https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/all-new-gen (, accessed 18 September 2020); Alessio Cavallaro, Ross Harley, Linda Wallace, and McKenzie Wark, Cultural Diversity in the Global Village: The Third International Symposium on Electronic Art (Sydney: Australian National Institute for Art and Technology, 1992), 67.

80 Schaffer, ‘The Game Girls of VNS Matrix’, 434.

81 VNS Matrix, ‘ALL NEW GEN: The Rules of the Game’ (1992), VNS Matrix Archive, https://vnsmatrix.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/all-new-gen-vns-matrix-1992-contested-zone-rules-of-the-game-final-version-text.pdf (accessed 22 September 2020).

82 VNS Matrix, ‘Bonding Booth script’ (1992), VNS Matrix Archive, https://vnsmatrix.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/all-new-gen-vns-matrix-1992-bonding-booth-video-script-final-version-text.pdf (accessed 27 February 2023).

83 VNS Matrix’s approach is reminiscent of twenty-first century research into ‘post-pornography’. Astrid Lorange and Tim Gregory have argued that post-pornography is ‘characterised by three aspects—the denaturalising of sex, the de-centring of the spectator, and the recognition of media and technology as inseparable from sex’. Tim Gregory and Astrid Lorange, ‘Teaching Post-Pornography’, Cultural Studies Review 24, no. 1 (2018): 138, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i1.5303.

84 Preciado, Testo Junkie, 16.

85 Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 67.

86 See Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman; National Gallery of Australia, ‘Annual Lecture: Decolonise Your Feminism’; Grant and Price, ‘Decolonizing Art History’.

87 Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues’, Postcolonial Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 118, doi: 10.1080/13688790.2014.966414.

88 Harwood is a descendent of Numbulwar where the Rose River opens onto the Gulf of Carpentaria. Tristen Harwood, ‘Love and Decolonisation in actu’, un Magazine 10, no. 2 (2016), 5.

89 Hester, Xenofeminism, 8.

90 Cyberfeminism has largely taken place in the West, in particular in the US and Europe. Mindy Seu, ‘About’, Cyberfeminism Index, https://cyberfeminismindex.com/about/.

91 Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia’s Frontier Wars (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2012), 1.

92 For an extended discussion of connections between military operations, statecraft, and new technology, see the chapter ‘Computation’ in James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018), 34–77.

93 Elizabeth Tynan, Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story (Sydney: NewSouth, 2016), 6.

94 Lin Onus, Maralinga, 1990, fibreglass, synthetic polymer paint, acrylic and paper stickers 163.0 x 56.0 x 62.0 cm, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Yhonnie Scarce, Thunder Raining Poison, 2015, glass assemblages, glass, wire, metal armature, 500 cm (dimensions variable), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

95 ‘ALL SYSTEMS GO… Wresat Circles the Earth’, The Canberra Times, November 39, 1967, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/106985303/11658054#.

96 Australian Network of Art and Technology, The Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) 1988 Annual Report (Adelaide: Australian Network of Art and Technology, 1989), 1.

97 Ibid.

98 Evans, ‘An Oral History of the First Cyberfeminists’.

99 Ibid.

100 VNS Matrix, ‘VNS Matrix: Slime Merch: About’, Threadless, https://vnsmatrix.threadless.com/about (accessed 22 February 2023).

101 Ibid.

102 Williams and Gilbert, Hegemony Now.